The Hollow Woman
5 years ago
Monday, December 15, 2008
Discipline
Maybe if I just make myself write every morning, soon after my walk. Soon enough to remember what I was thinking, if not the actual words. Lately I've felt a buffer grow between my consciousness and my heart. Just enough so I don't cry when I walk through the park. A little numbness, an unreality that lets me believe against rationality that somehow Jesse is still there (and by extension, that we are all still there, somewhere outside time). If we're no longer conscious, self aware, able to make decisions, to learn, to grow, then we are only memories (as in dreaming, as we exist in others). What we were in time, what was known of us lives on a little. It's a bit morbid, really. The memory of that person so easily bends to our will, sends us love, watches over us, whatever we ask of the dead, or the not-present. What say do they have, in what we imagine of them?
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I have 7 stenographer notebooks filled with first drafts - memories of my husband, my mother.
ReplyDeletememories my childhood...
Lately, I find myself wanting to describe the differences between today's world and the one I grew up in. This must be a sign of old age.
I don't believe it was better then...well, in some ways yes, it was. (not counting the overtly practiced racism and sexism.)
But it was sooo different. Fewer people, fewer highways (more farm and open land), different technology...omg what we regarded as state-of-the-art back then!
But it's those different things that affect the culture, and how well humans can cope with daily stress...and catastrophic events, like loss.
I find myself believing that it's important to get it down. I want olden-days stories to be told.
So I write...drafts. And they lay there, practically illegible, in stenographer's pads, rotated by colour: red, then black, then blue, then green, then back to red...
and who's to say the importance that information might have? We take too much for granted I think, simply because we ourselves already know it. I forget sometimes that my history isn't common to most people's in the US, much less to the rest of the world. Mostly because I was brought up differently than even those who lived next door to me. Maybe that's what makes me sympathetic to other outsider cultures. I've lived between two cultures all my life, and never stopped to realize that was my story. That the reason others felt at home in the part of the world we shared was because they were; not because there was something wrong with me.
ReplyDeleteI spent my first 6 years in Japan...it was my first language...co-language with English.
ReplyDeleteIt's amazing how different Asian languages are from Euro...Languages have always fascinated me - reflections of their culture...and then an influence on them, as well.
I've lived several places, having grown up military, been military, and been a military spouse.
I think in some ways I've collected cultural differences the way I've collected some of my experiences...on a sort of life list:
125° today;
windchill 92B today;
5 feet of snow this month;
hail the size of softballs;
135 stitches from accident...
____
am now saying gitarr, instead of guitar;
learned to say 'skif' rather than 'dusting';
heard 'nigger' x times in a single bus ride...
small wonder sociology captured my heart.
i hope you write a book, and share your olden days stories.
ReplyDelete"That the reason others felt at home in the part of the world we shared was because they were; not because there was something wrong with me."
ReplyDeleteThis is the kind of wisdom that seems small, but is powerful enough to change the world because it actually changes a life when it is understood.
Not that I understand it all that much, just a glimmer.
But you seem to get it - and we need you to share that. So thanks for being, and for writing.
Consciousness is a great mystery to me. I often wonder what remains after one loses awareness of self, no matter the underlying theology.
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